In the second of two conversations, Julian Bleecker discusses how the Near Future Laboratory helps organizations envision future scenarios using Design Fiction. Julian explains why imagination is essential for solving existential challenges and how it will help us shape the future. We also discuss Solarpunk, regenerative design, the future of work, and how Design Fiction can be applied to enrich marketing and advertising with immersive research and creative storytelling methods.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS:

Julian Bleecker: I want to establish the various practices that I intuitively feel leverage imagination as a means of sense-making. 

Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led, full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello. I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us for our first episode of 2024, which is the second part of my conversation with polymath Julian Bleecker, widely acknowledged as the originator of Design Fiction. Today, many leading foresight, insight, and innovation agencies employ the practice of Design Fiction, helping organizations envision possible futures through the creation of tangible artifacts. Now, if you missed it, I’d recommend listening to last week’s episode in which Julian shares how he developed Design Fiction and discusses large-scale projects, like designing for the future of autonomous vehicles. Today, we’ll pick up where we left off, exploring ways in which Design Fiction can be used to inform strategic decision-making and communications. For this conversation, Julian joined us from his studio in Venice, Los Angeles, California.

[MUSIC] 

Adrian Tennant: Today, you lead Near Future Laboratory, a design-led innovation studio working with clients to help them translate abstract strategy into tangible items. You’ve worked with clients including Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Ikea, Walmart, Warner Brothers, Netflix, and even J-Lo. So, Julian, what does a Near Future Laboratory engagement with a client or organization typically look like?

Julian Bleecker: Well, varies, but the typical thing, the initial kind of structure is three phases. So, the first phase is understanding where the organization is and where it desires to go. And we do that through a platform that initially started out as a kind of purely public way in which we did this work, but it became so effective as a way of helping unpack some of the ideas, thoughts, concerns, and considerations that an organization have – so we do essentially a General Seminar, and it’s a workshop kind of context, which is we start going through the futures that they imagine. And when you do that, you start finding ways to kind of represent those futures. And so in some organizations, it’s just basically, “Here’s all the things that we’re thinking about. Here’s all the places that we’re considering going into in our future. Here’s our product roadmap.” And what they’re looking for from us is less, “Tell us what to do next in order to get there.” They’re looking for the material that’s going to augment and help align the teams to the vision so that it feels a little bit more visceral and a little bit more tangible. And that that part of making that translation from their imagination and their dreams, their hopes, their, fears, their desires, their concerns, the challenges they feel they face. finding an effective way to represent that. And that’s what I refer to as a Design Fiction archetype. So, the magazine is one particular archetype. Sometimes, we’ll do something, like use the annual report – the typical corporate annual report – as an archetype, so we’ll do their annual report from the future and allow them to use that as a way of imagining into and hearing and feeling what that world might look like and what their CEO might say about the organization if they were to get to this future. And then, there’s the work of actually producing it. So, one of the most fun aspects of this is actually producing this material. And by that, I mean material, you know, actually making it. So when we do the magazine or the annual report or the tiny film, actually going through that process and seeing these ideas move from imaginary or even just prosaic things, you know, or metaphorical things. It’s kind of like, “Okay, let’s build that. Let’s make that, let’s make that tangible.” Let’s make that something that you can feel in a way that is different from us saying it or even different from us putting it up on a whiteboard and in the workshop or, you know, collecting a bunch of Post-Its and that kind of thing like doing that next level of translation is the part where things really start coming to life.

Adrian Tennant: In addition to commercial collaborations, Near Future Laboratory is the publisher of Design Fiction books, work kits, and other products. And along with your co-authors, you wrote “The Manual of Design Fiction,” now in its second edition, I believe. Julian, what prompted you to write the book?

Julian Bleecker: Well, I think there was a little bit of an existential component to it, which was, I felt like we had, in a humble way, [we] have been very articulate about Design Fiction as a practice, you know, just as you are in a relatively small corner of the world amongst designers and creatives. And it was gaining some currency, I guess you would say it was gaining some notoriety – again amongst, you know, like, I don’t know, eighty-three people. It wasn’t a huge, huge thing. And it felt like that having almost like a stake in the ground, professionally, my professional trajectory, there have been a number of times where I felt like I had done something, that, for some reason, I wasn’t able to make stand out. Almost like I’d not given up, but I sort of… like it felt embarrassing to stake a claim in a particular area or field. Early on, I did a lot of video game analysis, like in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. And people were saying like, “I think video games are gonna be a big deal – that could be like an area that you could establish yourself in.” And I just remember feeling like, “Oh, I don’t know. Establish myself? That feels like it’s full of hubris.” And I was wrong, you know. It turns out it was a big area, and if I’d spent more time and energy focused on it, that could have been something that could have been professionally satisfying. But I didn’t. And this was one thing where I said like, “No, no, no, you gotta get over that. And you have to do the work to establish that you wrote an essay and it meant something to people. It touched people to the point where it’s circulating, and it’s a value to people. Don’t shy away from having helped people to engage in a particular practice that clearly they were desiring to create, to be a part of. Help it. Move it along. Be of use to people in that way. Don’t move away from it.” And that was, that was sort of the motivation. It’s like, “Hey, let’s put a stake in the ground. Let’s write something and let’s call it The Manual of Design Fiction. So it’s very clear. “Here’s an important corner of this practice that we feel is of value and we feel that can grow and that we want more people to do.” So, doing the book was a way to do that. And I remember there were long and hard debates about what it should be called. And I wanted something that felt so instrumentalized. In other words, nothing long-winded. It’s just like, “This is the Manual of Design Fiction — no question about it. No question. That’s it.” And so that was essentially the motivation. I felt that the Near Future Laboratory, which started as my blog, you know, just nearfuturelaboratory.com, like back in, like in 2005 or 2006, was going through a kind of long transition into something else. And I wanted some kind of bookmark. It’s like I wanted an album that represented, you know, like the double two-album set that represents, you know, like, “Okay. I think this is the transition, the evolution into something else.” And that album, people will be able to go back and say like, “Oh, that was when it changed, you know, in this beautiful way.” And it felt like I needed something material, something, you know, an object to kind of stand-in for that.

Adrian Tennant: Well, you also produce and host the Near Future Laboratory podcast, you maintain the Near Future Laboratory Discord community, and you’ve recently held some special events, both online and in the real world, focused on particular areas of futures thinking as well. So, Julian, how do you curate the content and themes for the podcast and for your events?

Julian Bleecker: So my main motivation or approach for this kind of curation is that I want to establish the various practices that I Intuitively feel leverage imagination as a means of sense-making. I’ve just kind of come to this feeling that the more we can bring imagination into all different kinds of practices, the more we can, like, highlight it. Not as a loose kind of expression of good feeling or something that feels in some ways adolescent, but as, with the import and the semantic weight, as if you said “engineering,” or as if you said “technology,” or as if you said, “finance.” Because I think that there’s an instrumental character to it that can help, in an exceptional way, particularly with some of the big existential challenges that we’re facing. So when I think about the things that I’m curating, it’s like, I want to talk about and represent and share and elevate more of that kind of activities so it was different places in which it can mean something more. And so, you know, when I think about the podcast, when I think about the conversations in the Discord, when I think about the kinds of work that I want to do and the clients that I want to work with, and things like General Seminar and Super Seminar, it’s all around that sense that we need to imagine harder. And “Let me offer to you,” you know, the modest audience that I have, “let me offer to you all the different ways in which we can do that.” So General Seminar, let’s imagine a possible future in which – you know, take your pick – in which blockchain is as normal, ordinary, and as everyday as a television remote control. Nothing, no big deal; people barely bother to think about it. What is that future? And I think there are two things going on in that particular example. One is to imagine something that feels futuristic, blockchain, you know, whatever that means to you. And then the other thing is, how do you imagine something that doesn’t quite exist or that you might be confused and unsure about or where your first reaction might be like, “Well, I have no idea. I don’t know what blockchain is. So keep me out of this conversation.” Like no, but you have an imagination. I know you do. You had it when you were a little kid, and somehow, maybe it got atrophied a little bit because you don’t exercise enough. Come to General Seminar. It’s like Pilates for your imagination. We’re going to work out, and we’re going to figure out what it is and what it takes to imagine. So that’s the kind of undergirding of the podcast. It’s about having other people in conversation, talking about the ways in which engage in the kinds of activities of doing futuring and doing imagination or creating different contexts in which creativity and imagination are really brought to what I refer to as structure, really brought into enterprises that you wouldn’t normally think that they would have, you know, a futurist. But they do. Okay, so let’s talk about that. What is it, and how does it operate? And I feel like the more that we have these conversations, the more people hear about it, the more the words are articulated, and the more sense is made of what imagination and creativity can bring into the world. Beyond just what we normally think of, like, you know, artistic practice and these other, very important aspects of human creative consciousness, but actually in other areas, in other aspects of the work that we do and the kinds of work that is necessary in order to address some of the existential challenges that we have. You describe it as curating. I wish it was as organized as that sounds. It’s very instinctive, it’s very, “Ooh, it would just be great to talk to this person. This would be an amazing project to do. This would be encouraging in a kind of mentoring way, the activities that, you know, emerging or senior-level professionals are doing. Like, that sounds like a thing, like, let’s talk about it.” And it’s, you know, another aspect of being useful to people, which is talking more to folks. So, every time someone joins a Discord, we grab a coffee. We spend 20 minutes – it usually ends up being an hour. And that’s part of what you’re describing as curation. It’s like building a community. Building a sense of “Here’s a place where you can feel at home, when you’re like a highly imaginative, highly creative individual that is looking for a place to just feel like you belong.” And then encouraging people. It’s like, it can’t just be here. You have to find ways to bring it into the enterprise because it’s important, and people will sense it. There’s not going to be a lot of pull for it, but if you’re there doing it, then I think we can definitely make this kind of work into the kind of thing where it’s as vital to every organization as having a bookkeeper. You know, it’s just like, well, “Who’s your chief futurist?” “Well, what is that? We don’t have one.” So you want to have, you want a world where it is just a normal, ordinary, everyday thing.

Adrian Tennant: You mentioned community. What are some of the most notable or recurrent themes to have emerged from the Near Future Laboratory community, would you say? 

Julian Bleecker: There’s been a thoroughgoing interest, I think, because the community – it’s quite a bit open to things that are just at the kind of vanguard. So, things like, in and around Solarpunk, regenerative design has been an area that people are interested in. And so this kind of falls into the category of, I guess, broadly like how do we address the difficulty of imagining a world in which we have, if not overcome, managed to sustain ourselves in a world that’s been kind of addled by the effects of climate change? So how can we get there? And I think one of the biggest challenges just for that one particular area, which is why it’s important and why I think people in the community have been so inclined to focus on it, is that we don’t have a really good imaginary of what that world is. There isn’t a very good vision that we can feel into. Most science fiction, particularly science fiction films, because, I guess, because they feel like they need to be dramatic, is it’s an apocalypse. Like, it hasn’t worked out at all. It’s really bad. And I think things like Solarpunk and as a sort of literary, visual kind of genre of articulation of an imagination, which says like, “Hey, I want to see and sense into a world that hasn’t completely fallen apart, where we’re all stockpiling ammunition and water and living underground.” I think that’s, you know, it’s a generational desire where it’s like, “I don’t want that kind of collapse. So, I’m going to start representing in a beautifully naive way – naive is the wrong way to put it. In a beautiful way – it’s kind of like, “I don’t care if you’re telling me that the world’s going to be terrible. I’m going to show a world that isn’t.” And the same thing with regenerative design more as a practice. Those have been areas of interest. There’s also a lot of interest in the future of work, probably as a result of the challenges of what work is and what it’s been through the years of the pandemic and lockdown, people just sort of wondering, like, “What else happens?” But I think there’s a bigger thing. It’s like as people sense into the ill effects of the confusing distribution of wealth. They want to understand, “Are there other means and mechanisms of value exchange where I can do the things that I enjoy doing and obtain value from them. In other words, you know, something that comes back to me that I can use for exchange of other things. So maybe it’s not cash, I don’t know what it is, that you get paid for when you do this kind of future of work. But there’s been, you know, just, it’s a, it’s a wonderful kind of open topic, which requires a lot of imagination because we, you know, we all kind of grown up in a world where work as we understand it in a kind of pedestrian sense. Like you go into a job and the organization might be owned by someone else. and you feel fortunate to just even be there, but you could be let go at any particular moment. And you’re only hoping for places where you work where you feel like you are making a substantial and meaningful contribution, so you are of use, and you’re not just kind of grinding and toiling away. It’s very difficult to imagine alternatives. It’s not impossible, though. And so that’s why you do these kinds of explorations of what the future of work might be. And so that’s actually literally a project that we’re doing internally and in the Design Fiction mode. Where we’re doing the research, and we’re having conversations, we’re having General Seminars that are open to the public and deeply engaging in it and doing various kinds of fun exercises with the intent that we will represent all this research and our insights and our kind of imagination in the form of an employee manual, employee handbook. So describing that world in that thing that you get, you know, people understand you get like the first day like, “Okay, right – here it is. This explains the nature of your role here and how you fit in the larger goals and ambitions of the organization,” whatever they might be. But I suspect I don’t know, but I suspect it won’t sound like the usual kind of job. There’ll be something quite a bit different about it, and then having it as this materialized Design Fiction artifact, I think just helps tell that story more effectively. And it’s the kind of thing I think there are so many nerds like it like me who’d be like, “Yeah, of course I’ll have that! Like, why wouldn’t I want an Employee Handbook from the future? What would that even mean? But give it to me!”

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message. 

Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Julian Bleecker, artist, technologist, educator, originator of Design Fiction, and the founder of Near Future Laboratory. Well, today, I’m wearing a pin that came with one of my purchases from the Near Future Laboratory shop, which reads, “Imagine Harder.” Now, one of your recent publications is entitled “It’s Time to Imagine Harder.” In what kinds of ways do you think folks working in marketing and advertising roles could benefit from integrating Design Fiction practice into their existing creative or research processes? 

Julian Bleecker: A bunch of different ways. I’ll focus on two. One is sort of in the research context, and the other one is in the creative communications context. So advertising and marketing – and, I guess, PR to a certain extent. So, in the research context I’ve been on enough like kind of consumer studies boards, you know, just kind of unrelated to anything professional. Just every once again, someone calls you up and says like, “Hey, do you drink whiskey? If you do, we’ll pay you, you know, $200 for a couple hours of your time to answer some questions and be part of this research panel.” “Okay, cool. That sounds good.” Or come into your house and have a look around and poke into your cupboards. Interesting. Cool. Okay, I’m curious what’s going on here. And in the research context, I’ve experienced projects with clients where they just wanted a little bit more for the thing to be pondered over. So they wanted something other than, and I think this happens, you know, typically this will happen, especially if it’s, let’s say, a brand marketing consultancy, let’s ask humans what they think. Or this packaging. “Hmm. You know, like, let’s let them open it up and go through it and sort of see, you know, all the technical issues, like how does it open?” Well, all that kind of stuff. Beautiful. I love this kind of stuff because it is in this way you’re trying to establish, from a product design perspective, a future, right? It might seem very flat-footed. It might not seem futuristic, but that’s what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to help guide and inform your decision making with very analytic, kind of considerations. I mean, you know, maybe there’s some qualitative stuff there, like “Does this tagline make you feel happy or anxious?” Or, you know, whatever. It’s like, “Okay, that’s useful stuff.” I also wonder about, in a broader sense, creating Design Fiction artifacts that become the things around which, maybe, longer-term decisions are made. So this isn’t a decision that you’re going to make because in six months you got to get printing done for the advertising campaign or you’ve got to get the packaging finalized. This is more like a broader sense of the direction that an organization might go — and creating the actual artifacts that represent these worlds and even creating things that are not so didactic as like, you know, “Here’s our new phone. Which one do you prefer? Or this one has these features, and this one has these other features. Which do you prefer?” It’s more broad than that. So, you know, in my mind, it’s like, it’s actually creating something like we mentioned the magazine or the product catalog. In order to provide a little bit more set dressing around the world in which people might be exhibiting. So, richly experiential forms of doing research. So it’s not just the object, but it’s like, you can almost production design the entire environment in which people are. And ask them to, you know, consider this or, kind of immerse them … effectively send them off into this world that you’re imagining in order to do these kinds of richer, more experiential assessments and help, you know, getting back to this idea of helping to guide and inform and shape decision making. The other aspect is – so a project that we did with ADM, so Archer-Daniels-Midlands Company: “Supermarket to the world,” I think is still their tagline – I remember that from when I was a kid. It was much more of a longitudinal Design Fiction project that involved their chief scientists. So you know, this is amazing – the “Chief Scientist for Nutmeat Oil” sounds very specialized. It’s like their nutmeat oils are in everything. You’re kinda like, “Oh, okay. So it’s a big deal. I get it.” And so the question that was being asked was, “What are food futures?” And ADM wanted a way to represent that they were thinking deeply about these things. “We’re not just an old-line kind of brand that just grinds out ingredients. We do a lot of research work. We’ve invested heavily in trying to think about the things that are going to feed the world and how we’re going to actually do that. And so, in this case, we actually produce food products from these futures that were grounded. So these are things that the scientists were talking about, and we just sort of translate it because, you know, because they’re scientists, they’re talking at a level that doesn’t always communicate directly to a consumer. So you have to translate it into, like, “What is that? In some kind of future, what does it look like and how is it packaged, how is it represented?” So, actually creating these artifacts, these food artifacts, and some of which they actually produced. And the idea was that, you know, they were edible – and they weren’t horrible, you know!  It wasn’t a bar of pure protein or something like that. So it helped them, and it helped their sales channels to represent to their major clients, it’s like, yeah, you know, it was the more effective form of schwag. You know, it wasn’t just like, “Here’s a ballcap, and here’s a hoodie.” It was like, “Here are some things that we’re actually thinking about. We’re not actually the final manufacturer, but here are some things that are kind of in and around the world you, Nabisco, and the world that you’re in could represent.” And it was like, you know, actual packaged things. And then we also worked with them to create a vending machine. And the idea with the vending machine was that this is something that kind of, you know, it provided a context in which other people could experience it. You know, like, “There it is. What is this thing? What are these products?” And it takes you into that future – Design Fiction is the materialization of possible futures in a particular form. And this became that sort of container for it.

Adrian Tennant: Julian, what’s next for you and the Near Future Laboratory?

Julian Bleecker: Now, I refer to it as like Evolution 3. So Evolution 1 was, you know, my blog back when people used to do that. Evolution 2 was a bit like a bunch of guys who kind of hung out and occasionally did a project together, enjoyed each other’s company to the degree that we were, you know, we all sort of felt that this genre of doing, design work, futures work, was compelling and was effective and it was fun. You know, so I sometimes refer to this as the Dad Band phase. Like, it’s a bunch of dudes hanging out in a garage and, you know, kind of playing instruments together and occasionally doing a little show at the corner bar or playing at someone’s bar mitzvah or whatever it might be. And, Evolution 3 to me is where I just wanted to put more energy into it. So I had a company previously, and I sold that company, and then I was sort of like, “Well, what do I want to do next?” And I didn’t want to leave this behind. It felt too important. And once I fell into the value of it, not just as an approach to doing business, not just as a job – a design approach that maybe I could corner a little bit of the, you know, very small market, part of the marketplace, I felt like it was really, it was much more significant than that because there was this undergirding sense that, I felt very strongly, that was able to bring imagination back to the table, and I had gone through, you know, like a phase that I think very many people went to, where there’s a lot of imagination out there that was being brought to things like the evolution in technology and the internet and at some point imagination kinda got beaten down. It’s almost as if, structure – the other side, so the more, you know, the part of it was like, well, we got, “Okay, cool, we figured out how this internet thing is going to work best. It’s going to be very much transactional. It’s going to be an opportunity for connecting people in marketplaces.” And that’s all cool, like I’m not, I’m not anti that. I had a company that was a commercial company and it sold a product, and it made very good use of the internet in that way. What I felt like is that we need to ignite a kind of renaissance of creativity to find the ways in which we can evolve, and develop and imagine into the next iteration of more habitable world. And I felt that was such a passion that it’s like, “Okay, I need to put 150 percent into what Near Future Laboratory is.” And that’s the project now. And I recognize that can happen. I think that can happen most effectively, particularly that sensibility if Near Future Laboratory is more like a traveling music festival than just a, you know, like a small studio with a few people kind of working earnestly in a very kind of modernist mode of, “Okay, let’s get clients.” Cool. “Okay, what are our billings? Like we’re trying to, what run rate are we going for?” Not that that stuff isn’t important and not that I don’t focus on it, but before I focus on that, it’s like, it’s almost like proselytizing. Like, “It’s time to imagine harder.” And here’s a way in which I can do it. And one of the ways in which you can proselytize, I guess, and I’m not a very religious guy, but you kind of get the word out of there. It’s like, you open it up. So, let’s open the doors up. Let’s create a community of people who are around this, and the mantra is like amplify, coordinate, and collaborate across practices, across institutions, and organizations, and enterprises, and across the different agencies that otherwise might want to, you know, in a modernist mode, stay very siloed, stay very, kind of like, close-lipped. “You mustn’t look over here because that’s our special sauce.” It’s like, “No, no, no, that’s not the way it’s gonna work.” This has to feel like Glastonbury or Coachella. Everyone’s got to be able to come in and feel the energy and vibe and the potential and the possibility. And that’s essentially the future of it. Starting with community, starting with growing people’s sense of being able to participate in whatever Near Future Laboratory means to them. And then, you know, continue to evolve and develop and introduce and draw the practice into the very large organizations that are the ones that we’re going to need, that are going to have to help us create a more habitable world because, you know, I can’t do it alone, and I don’t think any, you know, a small individual studio can do it alone. We can create the vibe and, you know, essentially create the genre to use the music form. Create the genre. Now everyone’s got to, you know, really feel into it, and everyone’s got to enjoy it. And it’s like, “Oh, you know what? I’m going to try to create my own remix of what you guys did.” Beautiful. Great. what we want. We want this to grow. 

Adrian Tennant: Julian, if IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners would like to learn more about you and your work with Near Future Laboratory and maybe participate in a General Seminar, what’s the best way to do so? 

Julian Bleecker: The first best way is to read the books. And so that’s why I created “The Big Box of Design Fiction,” which includes three of the main books that I think give, one, a really good sense of what we’re trying to do and how we’re trying to do it. So it’s “The Manual of Design Fiction,” “It’s Time to Imagine Harder,” which I refer to as “The Reader’s Guide to the Manual of Design Fiction” – so, why Design Fiction? And then “TBD Catalog,” which I think is probably the best example of what Design Fiction looks, feels, and kind of senses like. And then I refer to “The Manual of Design Fiction,” it’s like the world’s first book to come with community. So, everyone who gets the book gets an invitation to join the Near Future Laboratory Discord, which is that place where there are now a couple thousand people who are engaged in the topic and trying to figure out how to engage more. That’s also where, you know, a lot of the announcements kind of happen when we do a General Seminar. And now we’ve got a couple of Super Seminars teed up, which is a much more in depth introduction to a particular topic. So those are a couple of points of entry. One thing I think is important to add in the spirit of what I’m trying to do and what I’m trying to build and grow – we never want anyone to be unable to access the vibe because of their financial circumstances. So we always say like, “If that’s you, if you’re like a student or if you’re in a position where it’s like, “Hey, look, I’m between jobs and really trying to figure things out. I can’t quite afford this stuff.” Then I just say like, “I’ve got an inbox. Just let me know what’s going on. Let’s talk, and we’ll figure it out.” And so I think those are other ways in which, you know, a variety of tiers. I do expect people who are kind of professionals in the practice who essentially have jobs. It’s like, look, if there’s value in this material, there’s value in it. I expect value back from, you know, what we poured in. It’s like, it’s a very simple exchange. And just because it sort of falls in the category, it’s like, “Well, it’s just knowledge. Can’t you just send me the PDF?” It’s like, “No, no, no, no. That’s not how this game works. Nothing’s for free. You got to bring something to it.” And that might mean participating actively in what we’re doing and what we’re trying to build and trying to grow in some fashion that we can talk about how you can do that. the money that you would spend to get “The Big Box of Design Fiction,” is probably less than you spend on coffee in a week. So, put it in those terms. Let us know that this is meaningful to you and that it’s unique and it’s something that isn’t meant to just be kind of given away because you have to feel enough into it. And if you don’t, if you don’t feel into it, that’s also cool. That’s fine. Then, you know, it’s not for you.

Adrian Tennant: And we’ll also include links to the Near Future Laboratory website, the podcast, and the shop where folks can find your Design Fiction books and related products to help us all imagine harder. Julian, thank you very much for being a guest on IN CLEAR FOCUS. 

Julian Bleecker: It’s my pleasure. Super fun talking to you.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest, Julian Bleecker: Design Fiction pioneer and the founder of Near Future Laboratory. As always, you’ll find a full transcript of our conversation along with links to the resources we discussed on the Bigeye website at bigeyeagency.com – just select ‘Podcast’ from the menu. Thanks for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.